home is where the fart is
poot poot!
People love asking, so, what’s home to you? As though it’s a harmless, cozy question. It is not. It is an emotional landmine disguised as small talk. Like asking a stranger what they name their inner child, or if they feel truly seen by their father.
When I was younger, I thought home meant where you live. Later, I thought it meant where you feel safe. These days, I think maybe it’s just where your Amazon packages know to go. Or where you can pass gas quite easily and the only one to judge you is your dog who does the same.
My house. I keep it tidy. I have drawers that close. My closets don’t contain mysterious smells or things that scurry. My book shelf is sorted. Not because I’m uptight, but because I believe King and Kundera can peacefully coexist without surprise. And yet, despite this admirable order, there are mornings I look around and think, Is this home? Or is it just a showroom where I happen to cry into an ice cream tub sometimes?
Pata nahin but it feels like home isn’t just comfort. It’s not even just cleanliness. Maybe it’s the place where your personal oddities have tenure.
Take my living room mirror. It has a little scratch on the top left corner, and I think the mirror is a bit biased in the most flattering way. I refuse to fix it. It makes me look 3% taller and 8% more emotionally stable. I would take it with me in a fire. Not because it’s valuable, but because it lies to me in all the right ways. That, to me, is home.
Or the way I always keep one sad banana on the counter, not because I plan to eat it, but because I like the quiet drama of its slow decay. It anchors me. Reminds me time is passing, and I’m doing a better job of it than the banana.
Haan Mister Gharelu Singh, home is where we can relax. But for me, it’s also where I can perform my weird rituals without human audience. Where I can talk to myself, out loud, in full paragraphs, while sorting receipts. Where I can open the fridge, stare at nothing, and whisper what-are-we-doing-with-our-life? directly into the fruit drawer.
I used to live with people. Partners. Flatmates. Maybe a ghost. Once. Max twice. And there’s a certain kind of domestic chaos that forces you to confront who you are. I learned I cannot share a washing machine with someone who believes rinse is optional. I also learned that silence is not the absence of noise. It’s the absence of someone loudly judging you for reheating chicken three nights in a row.
But when you live alone, or live your life in your chosen space, you start to notice that home isn’t a structure. It’s a narrative. Yours. It’s the story you tell yourself in the quiet. It’s where you let the weird stuff breathe. It’s where the heart takes its bra off, throws it on a chair, and eats dark chocolate in absolute moral ambiguity.
Toh shayad home is not a feeling. It’s a set of permissions.
The permission to keep everything pristine, and yet still eat oats for dinner, standing up.
The permission to cry over a dog food commercial while folding towels like a psycho.
The permission to let your inner goblin walk around the house pant-sans.
It’s the quiet privilege of being completely unhinged. On your own schedule. No applause. No witnesses. Just you, performing an extremely niche one-woman show called Domestic Duvidha: A Tragedy in Five Snacks.
Running nightly. Indefinitely.